HOLLOWAY PRISON HAD the forbidding exterior of a medieval castle, with its Gothic turrets and tall central tower, but life inside was not excessively grim. It was principally a jail for men and women who, like Wilde, were awaiting trial. Inmates were allowed to pay for extra food, which was delivered to them from restaurants on the nearby Holloway Road; they were also at liberty to wear their own clothes, to see visitors every day and to furnish their cells.
Only a year previously, Wilde had referred to Holloway in an early manuscript draft version of Earnest. In the scene, later dropped from the play, Algernon is arrested for having failed to settle an enormous bill at the Savoy Hotel (one of the creditors that later pressed a claim for payment at Wilde’s own bankruptcy proceedings). When Grigsby, the Savoy’s solicitor, informs the profligate aristocrat that he will be incarcerated in Holloway if he refuses to pay up, Algy declares that it is ‘perfectly ridiculous’ to be ‘imprisoned in the suburbs for having dined in the West End’. Grigsby assures Algy that the prison is actually rather ‘fashionable and well-aired’. There are also, he says, ‘ample opportunities of taking exercise’. ‘Exercise!’ exclaims Algy. ‘Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise.’1
Wilde suffered as he counted down the days to his trial, but that interim was relatively bearable. Not only was the regime at Holloway fairly relaxed, but it conformed to the idea of prison life he had derived from books. Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré compares his cell to a cheap room in Paris’s Latin Quarter; Stendhal’s Julien Sorel conducts lengthy interviews in jail with his lovers. These scenes evidently dominated Wilde’s imagination, as his pre-1895 writings contain several glib and romanticised references to prison life.
In Holloway Wilde could assume the role of one of his fictional heroes. He drew, in particular, on his own youthful tragedy The Duchess of Padua. In the play, the star-crossed lover Guido Ferranti professes his undying devotion to the Duchess of Padua in the darkness of his prison cell. Now Wilde poured out his love for Alfred Douglas in a series of letters. ‘Every great love has its tragedy,’ he told his ‘dearest boy’, ‘now ours has too . . . What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to me.’2
Unconvicted prisoners at Holloway enjoyed the privilege of reading as much, and more or less whatever, they liked. In his first letters from the prison, Wilde complained bitterly about the lack of books. To alleviate his boredom, the friends who visited him brought along numerous volumes. Douglas supplied Wilde with several titles, so did his friend, the author, newspaper editor and occasionally charming rogue, Frank Harris. Harris may have given him a copy of Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates eloquently defends himself in court from the charge of corrupting youth. He probably hoped that Wilde would draw courage and inspiration from the book – a rather bizarre notion, given that Socrates eventually lost his case and was condemned to death.3
Wilde asked Ada Leverson to send ‘some Stevensons – The Master of Ballantrae and Kidnapped’, probably because he craved comfort reading. Wilde had always regarded Stevenson as a ‘delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose’, though he was critical of some of his realistic excesses: ‘there is,’ he commented apropos of The Black Arrow, ‘such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true.’4 The Sphinx sent Wilde the Stevensons, along with a copy of Shakespeare’s plays.5 Perhaps the prisoner turned to the Bard’s dramatic trials and tragic prison scenes for strength and for some rhetorical tips.
However agreeable these volumes may have been, they could not even begin to console Wilde for the loss of his own books. On 24 April, just before his trial, his beloved collection was auctioned off, along with all the other effects from his ‘House Beautiful’, at the demand of his creditors. The principal creditor was the Marquess of Queensberry, who, at his trial, had been awarded £600 costs which Wilde was liable to pay; Q doubtless realised that a request for immediate payment would bring about a public sale of Wilde’s goods. ‘I hope you have copies of all my books,’ Wilde wrote to Alfred Douglas, referring to the first editions of his own published writings. ‘All mine have been sold.’6 Even before the sale, Wilde’s ‘Holy of Holies’ had been despoiled. Robbie Ross visited the library straight after Wilde’s arrest, in order to secure some of the choicest items. When Ross arrived at Tite Street he was horrified to discover that someone had been there before him. The lock on the library door was broken and some of Wilde’s letters and manuscripts had been stolen.7 The identity of those papers, and of the culprit, remains a mystery to this day.
Wilde’s trial at the Old Bailey began on 26 April and lasted five days. During the proceedings the wealth of highly damning, and extremely graphic, evidence that Queensberry had accumulated from Wilde’s rent boys was heard in open court. Wilde’s counsel managed to undermine the reliability of many of the boys’ statements, and in the dock Wilde excelled himself in eloquence when he was asked to elucidate the meaning of Douglas’s poetic phrase the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’. ‘It is,’ Wilde declared, ‘[a] deep and spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect . . . It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name” . . . The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’ The public galley burst into spontaneous and prolonged applause at the conclusion of the speech. One of Wilde’s friends claimed that it influenced the jury, who were unable to arrive at a unanimous verdict.8 The judge fixed a retrial for 20 May, and, after a week’s delay, Wilde was released on bail.
Wilde took a cab from Holloway to the Midland Hotel at St Pancras, but was immediately asked to leave. He travelled to another hotel, where he met with a similarly hostile reception: some of the other clients threatened to tear the establishment apart if he was permitted to stay.9 Their antagonism was fairly representative. Wilde had become the most hated man in England – his ‘diabolic sins’ provided the theme for countless sermons and the subject of sanctimonious articles in the national press.
Wilde had no alternative but to head for his mother’s house at 146 Oakley Street, Chelsea. He had been reluctant to seek refuge at Speranza’s in part because his brother Willie, from whom he had been estranged for some time, also resided there. Willie was an alcoholic wastrel, who sponged off his increasingly impecunious mother and his younger brother, whose success he envied but affected to despise. When Wilde knocked on the door of the house it was opened by Willie. ‘Give me shelter or I shall die in the streets,’ Wilde said, before falling ‘down on [the] threshold like a wounded stag’.10
For about ten days, during which he was violently ill, Wilde was a guest at Oakley Street, sleeping on a camp bed in the corner of a small room. He derived some comfort from his mother’s hoard of books. Speranza’s collection had dwindled since her Dublin days, as she had been forced to sell some of it to keep the wolfish bailiffs from the door. Nevertheless, the library at No. 146 was still ‘crowded with books from floor to ceiling, and in many places along the floor’.11 Some of the volumes that had accompanied Wilde through his Merrion Square childhood would almost certainly have been there – among them, no doubt, Speranza’s Poems, her anthologies of Irish folk tales, and her copies of Macpherson and Keats.
During his stay Wilde revisited the works of Wordsworth, who had always been one of Speranza’s idols. He read the Lake poet’s sonnets aloud in the company of the journalist Robert Sherard (an old friend from his bachelor days) perhaps from the very copy he had first perused in Dublin as a boy. Wilde’s forthcoming retrial, and the sober character of most of Wordsworth’s lines, made the occasion a solemn one, but humour suddenly broke through. When Wilde came across a sonnet in which the poet rhymed ‘love’ with ‘shove’ he burst out laughing, and exclaimed, ‘Robert, Robert, what does this mean?’12
In his account of those dark days, Sherard mentioned Speranza’s copy of the witty and rambling Essays of Montaigne. He and Wilde may have read them together.13 Sherard certainly quoted to Wilde the philosopher’s famous line: ‘Were I accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame the first thing I should do would be to put the frontier between myself and the gens de la justice.’ This was precisely what Sherard, and many of Wilde’s other intimates, urged him to do in the interim between his trials; Frank Harris even hired a steam yacht and stocked it with food and books, so that Wilde could sail in comfort to France.
Wilde’s brother and mother condemned these schemes as craven and dishonourable. Willie implored Wilde to stay to ‘face the music’ like ‘an Irish gentleman’; Speranza’s exhortation was even more forceful. ‘If you stay,’ she told him, ‘even if you go prison, you will always be my son . . . But if you go, I will never speak to you again.’14 These words are redolent of the speeches that Fingal and Ossian made to their warrior heir Oscar.
Wilde spent the latter half of his interval of freedom at Ada Leverson’s house at 2 Courtfield Gardens, Kensington, where he lodged in the nursery on the top floor. Like Sherard and Harris, the Sphinx courageously stood by Wilde in his adversity, though she courted opprobrium by doing so. Wilde passed his time there, among the toys, receiving visitors such as W.B. Yeats, and a tearful Constance.
In Leverson’s company Wilde made a point of being light-hearted, inventing marvellous parables for her pleasure and chatting pleasantly to her about books in an effort to keep his imminent trial from his mind.15 It was during his stay at Courtfield Gardens that he uttered his immortal epigram about the heroine of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. ‘One must have a heart of stone,’ Wilde quipped to the Sphinx, ‘to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’16
Sir Alfred Wills, the judge at Wilde’s second trial, considered him culpable from the outset, and gave a damning summing-up. The charge of ‘sodomy’ was dropped, but the jury returned a verdict of guilty on several indictments of ‘gross indecency’. Wills gave Wilde the maximum sentence of two years’ hard labour – a punishment he described as ‘totally inadequate’ for the crime. As the judgment was delivered, Wilde almost swooned in the dock. With a face contorted with anguish, he mumbled, ‘And I? May I say nothing, my lord?’; the judge waved him away.
Despite the famous English shibboleth about a man being innocent until he is proven guilty, the press had almost universally condemned Wilde on his arrest. ‘Open the windows!’ the Daily Telegraph now declared triumphantly. ‘Let in the fresh air!’
Harry Quilter was equally exultant – he claimed that Wilde’s ‘vices’ were the inevitable consequence of his ‘immoral’ Aesthetic credo, and reminded his readers of his own tireless attempts to ‘knock’ the ‘high priest’ of Aestheticism ‘on the head’. Wilde’s downfall was, he announced, a blow for decency and morality, which would now become, once again, the touchstones of literature and art. ‘There will,’ Quilter declared, ‘come back into the world some substitute for the old faith in God, and reverence for those things which are fair, lovely, and of good report’.*17
* Quilter’s prophecy was not fulfilled. The Modernist literary movement that grew out of the 1890s, and Edwardian art critics such as Bernard Berenson, ignored the values Quilter espoused and drew heavily upon the Aestheticism of Pater, Swinburne and Wilde.
Quilter lived on into the twentieth century, but in intellectual terms he was never at home in it. History has completely forgotten his work and his name only survives today because of the minuscule part he played in the lives of great aesthetes such as Wilde and Whistler.